Woodstock has the right to be a grump with poor culinary and musical tastes. That’s what makes America great. Bad taste.
No, wait…
Pretend I made a more meaningful and touching point here, ok?
I believe there’s a great distinction between someone passively expressing an opinion, or in this case, sitting (or standing), as compared to one who confronts another because they’re expressing an opinion that you don’t feel is acceptable.
No more than your standing. However, I believe that verbally accosting an individual is crossing the line. It’s no longer a passive matter, but a personal and confrontational one. What do you have to gain by trying to “share” (is that word better?) your opinion in a public place?
Again, it is none of your business. You’re not doing anyone any favors by “telling him that he’s wrong,” when in fact, it’s clearly a subjective matter, just as I don’t think you’re “wrong” for standing.
Duderdude: No obligiation exists.
Can’t agree there. The obligation exists for everyone in a society to conform to the basic customs of polite behavior in that society. If they choose not to do so, either in order to express contempt, or because of a moral principle that they believe those customs violate, or out of plain old laziness, they have to take the consequences.
Now, those consequences should never include being publicly lectured, much less physically forced, to behave politely. There’s no excuse for that. There, I think, we’re all in agreement.
However, like it or not, standing up to demonstrate respect while a national anthem is being played is one of the basic customs of polite behavior in America, as well as in many other places. If you personally don’t care whether other people follow that custom, fine. But you can’t just demand that nobody else should care either, or argue that it doesn’t really matter or isn’t anybody else’s business. Like it or not, standing for the anthem is an established rule of proper behavior, and there are lots of people who do care about it.
Apparently not for everybody.
They undercook your steak and send it to you that way because it gets it off their grill quicker. And because it takes talent to fully cook a steak and have it come out tender and moist on the inside instead of all dessicated and leathery.
Isn’t it convenient to have the overwhelming majority of restaurant patrons conned into thinking that if you warm up a slab of raw steak for a moment or two and send it out, you’ve given them a culinary experience instead of simply avoiding tying up your kitchen and your time actually cooking it?
It might be part that and it might be part the bit about how a restaurant can cook a steak more or not less. I am not sure I buy Ahunter’s theory that it’s simply that they’re trying to rush it; steaks don’t take as long to grill as a lot of other common orders take. If you rushed your steaks on purpose they’d just end up sitting around a lot waiting for the pork chops and chicken that the other customers in the party ordered.
But maybe it’s just me, but hasn’t the definition of “medium” and such changed in the last ten or twelve years? It seems to me that 10 years ago, if you went into a restaurant and ordered a steak medium, you would be served a steak that had been grilled to the point that it was pinkish in the centre and very hot. I always liked my steaks medium rare, which means that they were a bit red inside and warm. They did not get genuinely bloody until you asked for “rare.”
Today, if I order a steak medium, I get medium rare; if I order it medium rare it’s cool and blood runs over my plate. Rare is barely past steak tartare. My Mom used to like her steaks “rare” or “very rare” - I remember that very distinctly because she was the only person I knew who did - and now she orders “medium rare” to get the same steak. I can only imagine that if you were to order extra rare now, it would still be wearing a cowbell. And some restaurants are even worse. I have ordered medium steaks that when served were very rare - cold centers, running red with blood. I would assume based on this trend that “well” now means “medium.”
This change seem to have happened very recently.
Naw, if you order “extra rare” today, you get it with no pink at all.
Either that, or I’m getting woodstock’s steaks…
I know, right? Funny how every time I order medium, it comes out well done. We must be eating our steak in the same restaurant at the same time.
In regards to the steak issue, there are problems on the other side of the spectrum too, for sure. I like rare steak and hamburgers. Not a little pink in the middle, but almost blue, pleading for its life, super extra mega rare with jingle bells on. A lot of restaurants flatly refuse to give me a frigging rare burger, forcing me to eat chicken fingers again because a “medium” burger is not actually food, to me. While I sympathize with your problems getting the steak the way you want it, at least they make the gesture of at least pretending that well done is an option (even if it turns out to not really be well done.) They just dash my hopes right on the menu. Pleh.
The US National Anthem is jingoistic? They have nothing on the French:
"Let us go children of the Fatherland,
The day of glory arrived!
Against us of tyranny,
The bloody standard is raised, ((a))
You in the campaigns hear
Mugir these wild soldiers?
They come until in your arms
To cut the throat of your sons and your partners!
With the weapons, citizens,
Form your battalions,
Let us go, go!
That an impure blood
Water our furrows!
What wants this horde of slaves,
Entreated traitors, kings?
For which these wretched obstacles,
These irons as of prepared a long time? ((a))
French, for us, ah! which insult
What a transport it must excite!
It is us whom one dares to contemplate
To return to the antique slavery!
What! foreign troops
Would make the law in our homes!
What! these phalanges mercenaries
Our proud warriors would embank! ((a))
Large God! by connected hands
Our faces under the yoke are ploieraient
Cheap despots would become
Masters of our destinies!
Tremble, perfidious tyrants and you
Opprobrium of all the parties,
Tremble! your parricidal projects
Finally will receive their prices! ((a))
All is soldier to fight you,
If they fall, our young heroes,
Ground in product the new ones,
Against you any loans to be fought!
French, as warriors magnanimes,
Carry or retain your blows!
Save these sad victims,
With regret being armed against us. ((a))
But these sanguinary despots,
But these accomplices of Bouillé,
All these tigers which, without pity,
Tear the centre of their mother!
Crowned love of the Fatherland,
Lead, supports our arms avengers
Freedom, Most cherished liberty,
Engagements with your defenders! ((a))
Under our flags that victory
Runs to your males accents,
That your expiring enemies
Your triumph and our glory see!
We will enter the career
When our elder is not there any more,
We will find their dust there
And traces it their virtues ((a))
Much less jealous to survive to them
To divide their coffin,
We will have sublimates it pride
To avenge them or to follow them"
And as for your steak, I am from the total opposite spectrum in that I would prefer that they not cook it at all, but you know what? Get it however you want to.
The restaurants are just covering their asses with regards to E. coli infections (“Hamburger disease”), and I can’t blame them. If you want to take a chance on rare burger meat at home, that’s your look-out, but don’t expect restaurants to help you in your quest for hemorrhagic colitis.
I have to wonder if many restaurants have one default setting for steak: Medium. When I go out and order a steak, I’ll order it “rare. Walk a raw steak REAL FAST through a vaguely warm room. REAL RARE. Rare enough that if I had a vet here he could make it better.”
My husband will order his “medium”.
When we get them, they both look the same. I understand the whole E. coli thing and all, but dangitall, if they can’t or won’t offer it any rarer than “medium”, then they should frigging say so.
I’ve only been to one restaurant lately that actually did it right. I highly recommend Boone’s, outside Traverse City, MI, to anyone in the area. Get the Prime Rib. For you well-doners, ask for the end piece. You WON’T regret it.
I won’t touch the National Anthem thing, because I can sing it. Well. And have done. Professionally. 
(well, in that I got paid for it and all. Not like it was a big crowd or anything, but hey, I got paid!)
Oh, except to say that yeah, the Jimi Hendrix - Woodstock version is the best.
Reminds me of a sax player I read about in Jimmy Dorsey’s band. He was notorious for eating the same thing every night no matter where the band was playing: a vodka martini and a raw steak.
His last name was, appropriately enough, Lyons.